My Brilliant Life does not skate around mortality and suffering. Nor does it wallow, however, in the minutiae of pain. The novel unfolds from the perspective of a teenage boy, Areum, who has been aging at an abnormal speed since he was two years old. So it happens that Areum actually looks and often feels older than his parents who started their family when they were teenagers.
While Kim’s short stories differ greatly in style, she acknowledges her fascination with characters learning to cope with a dilemma when life didn’t turn out the way “it was supposed to.” For one thing, an unconventional child-parent relationship is a recurring theme in Kim’s work. In her short story, “Onset of Winter,” young parents mourn the premature death of their kindergartener son. The story explores the question: what makes life go on? And through the parents’ grieving process, we learn life goes on because it must. It is only the fact of the parents’ lives continuing—despite all—that forces them to face their own private tragedy. The parents must overcome the death of their child—a cruel and unnatural reversal of roles.
The ironic reversal of the son-parent relationship in My Brilliant Life adds layers to the prose and is reflected in Areum’s uncanny maturity and words. In response to a question about aging, Areum says: “When I’m really sick, the days feel so long . . . [sometimes] like an eternity. I’ve lived that so many times. So when you think about subjective time, I’ve certainly lived longer than [any of you].” What defines the usually vertical child-parent relationship is their generational gap. But when this equation is disturbed by Areum’s unique health conditions and the lonely experience of pain, the child finds the image of youth in his own parents. Thus the book turns the subjectivity of time on its head and interprets the measurement of time as a purely experiential phenomenon. Below is an excerpt from Areum’s correspondence with his pen pal:
I wanted to acknowledge all the time that exists inside you. My first thought was of Mount Halla . . . I learned that [some] mountains are so tall that different flowers bloom at different elevations, plants that couldn’t ever live in the same time and place existing together.The insights of this passage resonate throughout My Brilliant Life. Over less than two decades, Areum has experienced, through pain that has tested him constantly, a fuller expanse of life. He often calls his own parents “young,” asks questions such as “what does it feel like to be young?” or befriends and casually converses with an elderly neighbor. An avid reader, Areum also discovers this symbolic mountain of time in each book he reads, as he tries/attempts to pass the time. Itself an embodiment of the symbolic mountain, My Brilliant Life dictates our tragic hero’s life in which incompatibles are in harmony—from young parents with an aged son to the composure with which our young narrator confronts his unusual circumstance.
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When it first came out, My Brilliant Life set tongues wagging in the South Korean literary scene. The book saw immediate commercial success, selling over 140,000 copies just within the month of its release. But this outstanding commercial appeal put into question its literary merit. One critic even went so far as to describe the book’s appeal as “kitsch.” On the other hand, many critics and writers were just as eager to rush to Kim’s defense. These defendants lauded the novel as one that prioritizes elegant subtlety above all else in its symbolism and social commentary.
While Kim’s response to all this controversy emphasizes the writer’s faith in her readers, the dialogue this novel incited in the Korean literary scene poses compelling questions. If a literary work must explicitly deliberate and articulate its subject matters to be considered serious, how should we evaluate works that consciously resist that very approach, or furthermore, whose literary conventions depend entirely on expressing the futility of such an approach? For example, what does that criterion possibly imply about absurdist works? In response to this controversy, the esteemed Korean writer Hwang Sok-yong says: “[Kim is destined to be] a storyteller, and [a sly one at that] . . . [She] implements covert, double-faceted facts about life every chance she’s got . . . [And] this aerial combat with the readers is indeed Kim’s characteristic grace and forte.” Kim humbly leaves whatever answers there are to her readers, but clearly, readers can still find much to enjoy and ponder—even if they are not in search of answers to any of these questions.
Another common theme in Kim’s work is our society’s exploitation of people’s suffering—what might be better known as so-called trauma porn. From a popular TV show that broadcasts sick children to those who attempt to usurp them, My Brilliant Life studies the darker facets of capitalism and how sympathy works in this context. What’s intriguing about this far-from-new subject is that Kim examines this complex perversity of sympathy in her precise and matter-of-fact prose. Likewise, in “Onset of Winter,” Kim brings into question how the reality of capitalism looms over emotional truths, when the grieving parents are forced to use the insurance money from their son’s death—which they once deemed untouchable—because they are unable to afford housing otherwise. Kim takes no stance in either work, and instead focuses on writing what is: the whole ecosystem of human emotions with all that’s to be picked at, exposed. And her exposé doesn’t seem to target any specific group of individuals. In fact, her exposé is more of an exhibit curated with impartiality in mind, through which readers can amble, whether thinking critically or not. In that sense, with My Brilliant Life, Kim seems to be giving her readers the right to choose in reading and interpreting the life of a boy who has had so little choice.
When suffering becomes his daily routine and his life seems to be in a deadlock with time—sprinting forward but also stalled in moments of pain—Areum refuses to let his narrative welter in the depths of that negative experience. Even amidst all the suffering, he chooses to weave a tale of joy and love. The very lack of omnipotence has placed our human protagonist in a dire situation. And even so, Areum chooses to express with all his might how much light the sheer fact of human resilience can bring forth under harsh circumstances. And resilience is perhaps one thing that God is unable to fully digest, according to Areum, as the safety of omnipotence and omniscience leaves no room for such human agency that comes to life only in the face of a real challenge. Areum writes:
But sometimes I think about all the benefits we have because we’re not God. If there are things only God can do, then on the other hand there must be things that only we can do . . . [M]aybe we share something, among us humans, that even God would be envious about.
It is not surprising that Areum’s resilience, fueled by his imaginative spirit, brings out the storyteller in him. To handle his daily routine of pain and fatigue, he dedicates most of his leisure time to writing his origin story, starting from how he imagines his parents must have met. When I got in touch with her for an informal interview, Kim mentioned that only after finishing My Brilliant Life, was she able to look beyond herself as a writer; she’s been haunted, just like Areum, by the idea of retelling her own life through the medium of fiction, and many of her short stories harbor this haunting desire that later grew into the novel.
One of her short stories, “Who Dares to Shoot Firecrackers on Shore,” for example, is told by a young narrator who pesters his father for his origin story. The narrator of the story experiences time, specifically the past, as a space of infinite possibility. His father tells him a different version of his origin story every time, each in a vastly different style. The narrator realizes the past he hasn’t gone through himself is nothing but hearsay, after all. There’s a thin line between fiction and truth, and the young narrator finds that the truth of time is not linear or definite, but volatile and rich, as it is experienced and re-experienced, in retrospect or in recounts, each time differently. It is rather about what story gets told each time, and how it is told. And this also rings true for Kim’s aesthetics as a writer and her genre-crossing creative mind.
As a South Korean writer, Kim takes a necessarily fluid approach to language. South Korea has a long and complicated literary history. Linguistically, the country has endured, if not evolved, through censorship over the recent decades of dictatorship and the loss of much cultural heritage over international and civil wars and uprisings the country got involved in, most recently the Korean War (1950); and just to name a few others, the Pacific War (1945), Manchusabyeon (滿洲事變, 1931) which led to the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), Namhan Subjugation Operation (南韓大討伐作戰, 1909), the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895). Korean writers used Chinese characters even well into the 20th century and suffered linguistic oppression under Japanese colonial rule, during which the verbal and written use of the Korean language was prohibited and Korean people were forced to change their names to Japanese ones. These turbulent centuries left contemporary Korean literature, along with those writing it into existence, in a unique, somewhat isolated place.
Interestingly enough, when asked about her aesthetics in general, Kim answered that each story calls for the right form and style in which it demands to exist. In that sense, she strives to defy loyalty to one strand of literary tradition, whether Korean or foreign. She names Se-hui Cho as the contemporary Korean writer she most aspires for. She tells me Cho’s work often feels like a “many-handed Indian God” holding myriads of aces: realistic yet satirical, familiar yet experimental, precise yet lyric, all at once. Just as her literary predecessors responded to the ever-changing circumstances of South Korea, in both language and style, Kim concludes that “life [or] our time period [writes itself into being, into its true form]” and that “form or style is an instrument, and has never been the destination.”
It is worth noting that Kim based My Brilliant Life on a real person, Won-ki Hong, a boy suffering from Hutchinson-Gilford syndrome. He is the only patient with this condition living in South Korea, one case among less than one hundred in the world. South Korean media describe Won-ki as “a cheerful boy,” even “mischievous” at times, despite the psychological and medical isolation of his diagnosis. In an interview, Won-ki mentioned his dream was to grow taller, by twenty centimeters if possible, so he could meet the height requirement and go on amusement park rides. Kim breathes into Areum this glimmer of childlike hopefulness as well. When Areum speaks of his recurring dream about the time he went on the trampoline with his father, he doesn’t hesitate to call this experience “the brightest moment of our lives.” Notably, Areum says not “of his life” but “of our lives,” interlocking his own fate with his father’s and simultaneously acknowledging the rare sense of delight they shared. This delight stems from the simple sensation of buoyancy, the momentary lifting of that ever-present, deadweight agony. Throughout the novel, Areum returns to this dream even in some of his darkest moments, reminding us how little life needs to retain its inherent brilliance: just a little jump and you’re afloat, midair; how even the subconscious survives on and aspires to moments of brilliance, when the immediate reality seems like the very opposite.
In a recent interview, Kim said, “Time is every writer’s eternal subject.” Just like many of her other works, including “Who Dares to Shoot Firecrackers on Shore,” My Brilliant Life visits and revisits the concept of time. Areum’s time sprints past everyone else’s, including his parents’. Areum’s parents seem stuck in the past compared to their rapidly aging son. Books invite Areum into different time periods and open a world of secondhand experiences he would otherwise have no way to learn about, expanding his horizon. And in the end, Areum’s heart keeps pounding, longing, and writhing, for more days and days ahead, and keeps him in a race against time.
The original Korean title of My Brilliant Life uses an onomatopoeic word for “brilliant” that is closer to “palpitating.” This word, “palpitation”—the sound of a very human instinct to go on living—reverberates throughout the novel. It’s reminiscent of one of the other key uses of onomatopoeia in the novel—the sound “boing,” which Areum uses to describe the sensation of bouncing up and down on the trampoline, its springs elastic like cardiac muscle to keep the blood flowing. What’s at the heart of this novel is that very insistent, relentless pulse, that all of us share as participants in our individual and collective race against time.
